We live in an age of sequels. Many film lovers think the best sequel ever is The Godfather: Part II, and I support them. But the true impact of the second movie was to ensure from then on that no novelist, filmmaker, TV executive, documentarian, or record producer would ever again consider a major undertaking without weighing the opportunity to follow up, round out, and extend the original material into a multipart bonanza. But what of the original story, the creation, rooted in its time, foreshadowing—maybe—all that comes after it? Not just fun but instructive, a return to roots deepens our understanding, providing glimpses of the mature creature in embryo, so to speak.

In my latest book, The Antidote, I dramatize a twenty-year period, starting from when Vertex emerged as a promising but cash-starved start-up with distant ambitions to compete with the major pharmaceutical companies. The story climaxes with the company beating Big Pharma simultaneously in major disease areas, in a period of sweeping change throughout health care and society that even its far-seeing, charismatic founder Joshua Boger hadn’t envisioned. How it survived that period (burning through nearly $4 billion) to mount a challenge to the old biomedical order just as that order was crumbling drives an account of ambition and hope, hubris and Wall Street, ferocious competition and extraordinary collaboration, extreme highs and desperate lows.

What’s amazing (to me at least) is how much of that story—its DNA, to use the obvious trope—is stuffed into this first book, coiled and ready to unfold. Here, for instance, is Boger, age thirty-nine, a year after defecting from Merck, commenting on his treatment by the world’s biggest drug company, Glaxo, where executives listened to his proposal to collaborate on a program, heard his exorbitant demands, and promptly showed him the door: “Arrogance doesn’t disturb or impress us. We understand arrogance.” Or else here, in a meeting with Vertex’s scientific advisors, an august group of a half dozen senior Harvard scientists, as he explained his plan to upend the drug industry by designing better drugs atom by atom. “What’s to stop Glaxo from saying, ‘Oh, oh, we see. Maybe we can do what you’re telling us ourselves’?” someone asked.

“But they can’t do it,” Boger said.

“But Merck can.”

“No, Merck can’t either.”

Boger’s blunt assurance that he could do what Merck, the most admired corporation in America, could not, was creating on the fly a uniquely confident and ambitious research group. Throughout the time that I was there Vertex was more of a free-lance lab and privatized university-style consortium than a commercial drug business. Nearly everybody, including me, was younger than Boger, and it showed. The company was creating itself to conceive of and design and build small molecules better than the world’s most skilled, profitable, and heavily endowed research organizations and what it took from the scientists was utter commitment, extreme passion, thrilling insight, and fearlessness. A volatile mix at any age, this is an especially strong brew for thirtysomethings, pent-up and wild to do the things that will distinguish them in life and launch their careers.

So remember the place was a research boutique, not a drug company. The differences are huge, as I immediately discovered when I realized in late 2010 that I wanted to go back inside. I approached Boger, and he discouraged me. Drug companies had become a favored target of federal prosecutors, and the companies were paying billions in penalties for defrauding government payers, bribing doctors and hospitals, marketing drugs for unapproved diseases, foisting antidepressants on nursing home patients, and otherwise trying to wring profits out of expiring product lines. Retired by then from Vertex, Boger told me he thought it would never let me back inside. It was Ken, his older brother and the company’s general counsel, who convinced CEO Matt Emmens that it could manage the risk of having a reporter hanging around, and that I could be trusted.

I couldn’t know in the fall of 1989 when I first wandered into Vertex’s work in progress what I would see, much less that twenty-five years later I would return to publish a sequel. But I quickly found out that everyone there understood that it would take twenty-five years and possibly much longer to know whether they were really succeeding. Merck wasn’t built in a day. The company became a research powerhouse in the forties and fifties, and only decades later became the paragon of the late twentieth century after its labs delivered a string of first in class and best in class pharmaceuticals. At its zenith, its stock spiked 500 percent in five years while it distributed free an unlimited supply of the drug Avermectin to cure African river blindness and began leading the way in developing treatments for AIDS. By that time, Merck was an organization, culture, and brand a half century in the making.

I’ve thought hard about how to situate this original story and its sequel among other well-known stories about American industrialists and the companies they built. Andrew Carnegie was thirty-five when he traveled to England in 1872, witnessed the Bessemer process for making steel, and “got the flash,” as he liked to say: came to understand that steel would replace iron for building railroads and bridges, which ignited him to “press inordinately” to build his own steel company from the ground up. Three years later he opened his first steel plant. In 1901, twenty-six years later, he sold Carnegie Steel to J.P. Morgan, allowing Morgan to create U.S. Steel and making Carnegie the world’s richest man.

Thomas Edison moved to Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876, establishing his first full-scale industrial research laboratory, combining electrical and chemical labs with an experimental machine shop. He was twenty-nine. Three years later he invented the carbon-filament lamp, then three years after that opened new offices in lower Manhattan and started construction of the first permanent electrical power station. Throughout his forties, as he introduced the phonograph and a system for making and showing motion pictures, Edison labored to develop a method for processing low-grade iron for use by eastern smelters. The effort collapsed after the discovery of rich new mines in the Midwest. In 1901, twenty-five years after launching his Menlo Park “invention factory,” its descendant General Electric organized the first modern R&D lab.

Nowadays the chief reference point for anyone charting the dramatic arc of an innovative company and its visionary founder is the triumphal three-act history—so established in the culture that it’s become a meme—of Apple and Steve Jobs. Jobs was barely twenty-one in the spring of 1976 when he and Steve Wozniak started assembling Apple I computers in his family’s garage. Nine years later, after introducing the Macintosh, he was stripped of control in a palace coup, then returned to Apple more than a decade after that, when he was forty-two, to rebuild the company. In 2007, in his most memorable keynote presentation ever, Jobs unveiled the iPhone with its life-altering touch-screen interface: the Emancipation Proclamation of the mobile revolution.

In the time of Siri, we forget how different life was before Jobs and others transformed modern communications. I remember my delight, before the emergence of the Internet, when I realized in 1990 that Vertex’s negotiations by fax with a Japanese partner were proceeding twice as fast as if the other company was located across the street in Cambridge. It worked like this: chief business officer Rich Aldrich would feed a document into the machine as he was leaving work; his Japanese counterparts would receive it just as they were arriving for the day, then revise it until they left that night. And so on. In other words, while Aldrich and America slept, the spinning earth accelerated discussions that in the same time zone would have to wait till tomorrow.

Then there’s this gem, from when I mention on page 158 of this book that instead of sending around paper memos, Boger had begun notifying the scientists “via electronic mail (email).” Vertex is older than e-commerce, the human genome, and the mobile age. Boger is sixty-one. Neither he nor the company has gotten anywhere near as rich, famous or influential as history’s great business titans and their industry-shaping corporations. I’m not necessarily putting Boger in the same category as Carnegie, Edison, and Jobs, nor am I putting Vertex on a plane with U.S. Steel, General Electric, and Apple.

But I’m not counting them out either. (Perhaps my third book about Vertex, reported on eighty-five-year-old legs, beamed directly from my brain into God knows what kind of personal device, published globally in 2039, will have something to add here.) As protagonists in an evolving story, Boger and Vertex in volumes one and two have cleared a key threshold. The company is now solidly a drug company, with two major, pathbreaking successes to its credit and a multibillion dollar franchise with a long, prosperous business cycle ahead of it. Just as in The Godfather Vito Corleone builds the family business in the first picture so that his son Michael can leverage it in the second, Boger has handed Vertex to others to drive ahead.

While I was researching The Antidote, I tried to describe what I was doing and feeling. I told people: “It’s like I was in the garage with Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and now I’m watching from backstage as Jobs introduces the iPhone.” Will Vertex go on to become the world’s most valuable company, as Apple has done since then and after Jobs left the scene? Most likely not, though it’s surely possible, and as Boger likes to say; “Until something is not a possibility, it’s a possibility.” Frankly I don’t think that matters now, at least for reading purposes. I think it’s fair to summarize at this point that Boger’s quest from the minute when he sat at his whiteboard at home in New Jersey and summed up his goals (Make better drugs faster: Become Merck, but better; Build the 21st century pharmaceutical company) until the approval of Vertex’s breakthrough cystic fibrosis drug, Kalydeco, ranks with those of other heroes of American business. So far.

If Boger and Vertex warrant specific comparison it would have to be with George Merck and the family-owned fine chemical company that he turned from a vitamin business into what BusinessWeek, around the time this book was first published, crowned on its cover “The Miracle Company.” Unlike Boger, Merck wasn’t a scientist, but he saw that patient-focused R&D was the future. Like Boger, he surrounded himself with people who could make the future happen. In August 1952, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine over the heading, “Medicine is for people, not for profits.” He was lauded for his altruism, but George Merck was also canny, adding: “If we remember this, the profits will follow.”

Vertex arose directly out of this lost two-part wisdom. It has been Boger’s point precisely from the day he left Merck and started on the long road to building a drug company. I went back inside Vertex in 2011 because I wanted to see what Boger’s vision had produced. I’d been fascinated once by the sheer audacity of it, and what I saw when I returned resembled—to a remarkable degree—the picture he had first painted for me, back before the Gulf War and the dot.com revolution and the rise of blockbuster biologics and the cost crisis in health care and the yawning self-doubt that seems more and more to grip the national psyche.

The Billion-Dollar Molecule records Vertex’s daring beginnings up against crushing odds. The Antidote tells the story of how it emerged to become a touchstone of American innovation. Where the company goes from here we don’t know, but what sort of force it will be in the industry and the world will depend primarily on what happens in the labs—whether the original company spirit, forged in its early days, survives.

Stay tuned.